No Job, No School: Report Looks At 'Disconnected' Youths And Finds Good Things In Connecticut

Of all American youths between 16 and 24, more than 5.5 million of them — or 13.8 percent — are neither working nor in school, according to a new study.

The numbers of "disconnected youths," as they're described in a report from the Social Science Research Council's Measure Of America project, vary wildly from city to city.

But Connecticut's metro areas have some of the lowest levels of such disconnection. The Bridgeport-Stamford-Norwalk metropolitan statistical area, for example, has the second-lowest rate of disconnected youths in the nation, at 7.7 percent, the study found — second only to Omaha, Neb.

On the other side of the scale, in the Memphis, Tenn., metro area, more than 21 percent of the 16- to 24-year-olds are out of work and out of school, according to the report.

The measure is important because when they are "isolated from the mainstream and cut off from the information, guidance, support, and sense of purpose that school and work provide, these young people and millions like them across the country face a rocky and uncertain transition to adulthood," the report states.

In Connecticut as a whole, some 46,335 youths in that age group are out of work and school, the report states, or about 10.6 percent, 12th-lowest rate in the nation.

The states with the lowest disconnection rates are in the Upper Midwest: Nebraska, North Dakota, Iowa, Minnesota, South Dakota, Kansas and Wisconsin all rank in the top 10, along with three New England states: Vermont, Massachusetts and Maine. New Hampshire is 11th.

The report also looks at disconnection in metro areas by race and finds that black youths in particular are "at the margins of society."

The disconnection rate in the New Haven metro area for black youths is alarmingly high — 24.6 percent, according to the study, the 12th-worst rate calculated. There wasn't enough data from the Bridgeport and Hartford metro areas to reliably report disconnection rates for black and Latino groups, according to the study. But the disconnection rates for white youths was 6.5 percent in New Haven metro, 5.5 percent in Bridgeport metro and 6.6 percent in Hartford metro.

And while the rates are high, they have been going down.

"The good news is that the national youth disconnection rate has fallen from its recession-era high," the report states. "The number of disconnected youth rose sharply after 2008 and lingered around 5.8 million in 2010 and 2011. Today’s rate of 13.8 percent represents a reduction in the number of disconnected youth of about 280,000 from the peak in 2010. ... The bad news is that huge gaps by place and by race and ethnicity remain."

The costs of youth disconnection are difficult to measure, the report states, but by looking at four specific costs — incarceration, Medicaid, public assistance payments and Supplemental Social Security payments — the youths in this group cost taxpayers $26.8 billion in 2013 alone.

Disconnected youths are twice as likely to live in poverty, three times as likely to have left high school without a diploma, and half as likely to hold bachelor's degrees, according to the study. Disconnected females are more than three times as likely to have a child.

The study found that segregation was key to the dynamic.

"Place matters. Race matters. But our analysis shows that the combination of the two really packs a wallop," the report states. "Concentrated racial segregation within metro areas has dramatic but very different consequences for young people depending on their race. And this difference is based in part on the distance to opportunity —not only a physical distance but also a social and aspirational distance."

Further, "the more segregated blacks and whites are from one another within a metro area, the lower the likelihood of youth disconnection is among whites, but the higher the likelihood is among blacks."

The report makes several recommendations to reduce disconnection, including helping at-risk parents, investing in quality pre-school for 3- and 4-year-olds and K-12 education, and exploring apprenticeship and mentoring problems.